Listening to Jordan Peterson and Jonathon Haidt discuss Heterodox Academy I suddenly realized that they were talking about two very different things simultaneously. Two things that went almost by the same name, but were literally contradictory.
Let’s call two groups ‘red’ and ‘blue’, and let’s pretend for a minute that they are the only two groups. (They aren’t, and I would love to hear Dr. Peterson discussing where ‘libertarian’, for example, falls in the spectrum of ‘conservative’ vs ‘liberal’.) The discussion was focused on getting these two groups together, pointing out that both were needed in the academic setting.
But lost underneath the discussion was the very real question of why these two groups were necessary. They discussed it a lot, but they missed the underlying issue that there are two very separate, contradictory, reasons why these two groups might need to get together.
I will call these two reasons ‘hand/foot’ and ‘purple’. Let’s look at the second one first.
One reason that we might need to get two groups together is that they are both wrong. If an artist is trying to draw a purple flower, and they have red and blue paint, they will deliberately mix the red and the blue to arrive at the purple that they wish. If the group is too red, they will add some blue. If too blue, they will add some red.
The advertisement for Heterodox university, founded by Jonathon Haidt, seems to suggest this is a reason… without clearly coming down on this side. The graphic shows little colored squares coming into contact with other colored squares… and one or more of them changing color.
This is a very valid and important reason for getting two groups together. But let’s notice that the artist does not actually value the red or the blue for itself. The red, by itself, and the blue, by itself, are both the ‘wrong’ color. The actual ‘right’ color is purple. If the artist had access to purple paint, they would not bother with red or blue.
The other reason for getting two different groups together I call the ‘hand/foot’ reason. (Full disclosure: I did not invent this metaphor.) That reason would be where it is literally necessary to have both groups together… and have them remain as they are. Red and blue not mixing together to make purple: but red is used to color the blood in the arteries, and blue is used to color the blood in the veins.
An example of this comes from a TV show I used to watch about a temperamental British Chef. He was a fantastic chef, and produced wonderful food.
But the food was very expensive. He was always on a search for even better ingredients… which always turned out to be more expensive ingredients.
Which brings us to our second character: the accountant. She was always storming into his kitchen and complaining about his latest, most outrageous purchase.
The end result of this metaphor is that we need both red and blue, and we need the red to stay red, and the blue to stay blue. At times during their discussion Peterson and Haidt hint that this is what they are aiming at. The restaurant needed the brilliant chef to make wonderful food… so that it would have customers to buy the meals. But it also needed the accountant to ensure that the meals did not cost the restaurant so much that it lost money on each meal!
The point here was that each person was ‘right’ in their own area: the chef knew how to cook, and the accountant knew how to balance books. Neither of them could do the others job. Both were needed.
And the tension of the show was to keep the chef from quitting and the restaurant from closing. And not by turning the chef into an accountant or, heaven forbid, by turning the accountant into a chef. The chef needed to respect the work of the accountant, and vice versa, but neither needed to change who they were, their skills, their values… but instead merely needed to limit their actions in light of the other’s values.
So my challenge to the Peterson/Haidt movement is to recognize that when one advocates for two (or more) groups to ‘get together’, one really needs to decide which of these two goals, or which combination, one is going for. Is one interested in producing purple? Or a functioning body in which the hand does hand things, the foot does foot things, and the body works well together?